Tech Brew Ride Home - Fri. 11/16 - How Much Money Does Airbnb Make?

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Airbnb opens the kimono, a disc-less Xbox, Facebook pushes back on controversy, SpaceX gets a key go-ahead, and the weekend longreads suggestions. Links: Airbnb booked more than $1 billion in third quarter revenue (CNBC) Microsoft’s Building a Disc-Less Xbox One for Release in 2019 (Thurrott.com) Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along With Stock Price (WSJ) ‘I Don’t Really Want to Work for Facebook.’ So Say Some Computer Science Students. (NYTimes) Major SMS security lapse is a reminder to use authenticator apps instead (The Verge) The Betterment Weekend Longreads: THE GENIUS NEUROSCIENTIST WHO MIGHT HOLD THE KEY TO TRUE AI (Wired) Are Killer Robots the Future of War? Parsing the Facts on Autonomous Weapons (NYTimes Magazine) The Internet Has a Huge C/C++ Problem and Developers Don't Want to Deal With It (Motherboard) How Superhuman Built an Engine to Find Product/Market Fit (First Round Review) THE HAIL MARY PLAN TO RESTART A HACKED US ELECTRIC GRID (Wired) Space Camp grows up (Mashable) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to the Tech Meme Ride Home for Friday, November 16th, 2018. I'm Brian McCullough today. Airbnb opens the kimono.

A discless Xbox might be coming. Facebook pushes back on controversy. SpaceX gets a key go-ahead. And the weekend Longreads suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. It's become something of a regular thing for big unicorn companies to begin releasing data on their revenue numbers. shortly before starting the process of going public. Uber does it, WeWork does it,

and now for the first time we have a peek inside Airbnb's kimono. Spoiler alert, they've got quite a nice little business there. In a memo released today, Airbnb says it recognized, quote, substantially more than $1 billion in Q3 revenues, is on track to report EBITDA profits for 2017 and earned $100 million on $2,000, on $2.6 billion in revenue in 2017. Quoting from CNBC, CEO Brian Chesky said the company would be ready to go public by mid-2019,

but the company hasn't decided when. Airbnb is one of the most valuable startups in the U.S. at $31 billion. The FCC has officially given SpaceX permission to deploy over 7,000 Starlink Internet, satellites as part of a full network of 12,000 satellites that it hopes to eventually launch to blanket the globe with Internet access. Quoting the Washington Post, SpaceX's Starlink program launched its first test satellites in February. The FCC gave SpaceX approval the next month for its first 4,400 satellites.

The company has an initial goal to deploy 1,600 satellites in the next few years, but it has said that it could take more than six years to complete the full network, end quote. In a celebratory anniversary post, Sony says that it has sold 86.1 million units of its PlayStation 4 game console since that system debuted exactly five years ago. It has also sold 77.9 million copies of software on the PlayStation 4 platform. Microsoft, of course, does not release sales numbers for its Xbox One console, so we can't compare apples to oranges. But we do know that Nintendo's Switch has sold over 22.86 million units since its debut in March of 2017. However, how much would a super cheap console be able to sell? Sources are telling Brad Sams at Therat.com that Microsoft has plans to release a disc-less

Xbox console that will cost $200 or less in 2019 and will let users trade in discs for digital game downloads at participating retailers. As we've been saying recently, the future of gaming is definitely in the cloud. But back to Sony, who also today announced that it will not attend next year's E3, the annual video game trade show, marking the first time in E3's 24-year history that Sony will not be a participant. You know, everybody's always saying that these big conferences and trade shows are just over.

Their day has passed. Everyone says CES is mostly meaningless now, and yet every January, everyone traipses out to Vegas to party. Everyone says, South by Southwest, ain't what it used to be. But every March, my Twitter feed is nothing but y'all and your South By tweets. What's that Yogi Barrow line? Nobody goes there anymore because it's too crowded.

Well, as probably expected, I guess, Facebook has been pushing back on that New York Times blockbuster story that we've been speaking about. In a post on her personal Facebook page, Facebook C.O. Cheryl Sandberg said allegations that she and Mark Zuckerberg hid information about Russian interference on the plighton. platform is simply untrue and says that she didn't know Facebook had hired that controversial

PR firm that Facebook also fired recently. I also want to address the issue that has been raised about a PR firm, Definers. We're no longer working with them, but at the time they were trying to show that some of the activity against us that appeared to be grassroots also had major organizations behind them. I did not know we hired them or about the work they were doing. but I should have. I have great respect for George Soros, and the anti-Semitic conspiracy theories against him are abhorrent, end quote. Facebook's Board of Directors is pushing back as well in a statement the board said, quote,

as Mark and Cheryl made clear to Congress, the company was slow to spot Russian interference and too slow to take action. As a board, we did indeed push them to move faster, but to suggest that they knew about Russian interference and either tried to ignore it or prevent investigations into what happened is grossly unfair, unquote. And yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg himself held a conference call with reporters, where he defended Sandberg specifically. Quote, overall, Cheryl is doing great work for the company, Zuckerberg said. She's been a very important partner to me and will continue to be. She's leading a lot of the efforts to improve our systems. We're making a lot of progress, and a lot of that is because of the work she is doing, end quote. You know what? Facebook's executive suite is probably the most worried about right now, aside from, you know, more

political pressure and stuff like that, stories like the one in the Wall Street Journal that says morale inside Facebook is plummeting, quote, amid a plunge in the stock price, ongoing leadership turmoil and critical media coverage, just over half of employees said they were optimistic about Facebook's future. Down 32 percentage points from the year earlier, according to the survey, which was taken by nearly 29,000 employees. 53% said Facebook was making the world better, down 19 percentage points from a year ago, end quote. And they can't like stories like this one from the New York Times,

saying tech recruiters are increasingly hearing from millennial workers that they don't want to work at Facebook. Quote, I've heard a lot of employees who work there don't even use it, said Nikki Aurora, 19 an engineering student who was recently invited to a Facebook recruiting event at the company's headquarters in Menlo Park, California. I just don't believe in the product because, like, Facebook, the baseline of everything they do is desire to show people more ads. Before it was this glorious, magical thing to work there, said Jazz Singh, 18, also studying computer science. Now it's like, just because it does what you want doesn't mean it's doing good, end quote. Now, look, the New York Times, as I think I've said before, is notorious for its trend pieces where they interview three people and suddenly declare that Z. Kavarici-style hammer pants are back in fashion.

But look, forget about losing the trust of your users. Nothing can hobble a tech company more than losing the label as the coolest place to work. or even because younger workers are always idealistic and not yet jaded, as the place to work where you can make the world a better place. If you can't attract top talent, you can find yourself as an also-ran for a whole tech generation. Again, evidence A, I point you to Microsoft and its lost decade, which it is only now coming out of.

This is double plus ungood. Voxox is a San Diego-based communications company. It had a server running to manage the flow of SMS text messages from users. It did not protect that server with a password. Thus, the real-time stream of millions of user text messages was left exposed out in the open for anyone to snoop on. Okay. Any breach of user data is bad, right? But think about it.

How often do you use a text message now for two-factor authentication to log in to Gmail, to log in to your bank, maybe? Yes, the threat vector around regular old text messages these days is more severe than it used to be. And because it was the real-time stream of text messages that was being exposed, this was like the absolute dream exposure for any hacker. So, shame on you, Voxox. Password protect your stuff, as user A. Clark C said on the podcast subreddit, you had one job. But for the rest of you, use this story as a reminder to wherever you can. Try not to rely on SMS text messages as two-factor authentication systems. Instead, use dedicated authenticator apps, quoting John Porter in The Verge.

Using an authentication app such as Google Authenticator or OnePassword with its built-in two-factor code generator is much more convenient and secure. These apps are completely self-contained, meaning no sensitive data needs to be sent to them. And this also creates the secondary benefit of allowing them to work when your phone doesn't have an active cell connection. Increasingly, hardware keys are also proving popular with Google reporting it has seen no successful fishing attacks since making hardware security keys mandatory for its employees. Unfortunately, in some cases, you'll still need to rely on SMS as a security backup, but this should only be used as a last resort to minimize your exposure to breaches such as this, end quote. Well, as always, it is time for the weekend Longreed suggestions brought to you once more by Betterment.

Here's a smart way to start your weekend after you listen to these weekend long reads. head to your search engine of preference and type in betterment. Your long-term fiscal health will thank you for it. First up, Wired this month has a special issue on AI, and among the features therein is a profile of neuroscientist Carl Fristin and his free energy principle that some people think might be the key to developing true AI. So what is this idea of the free energy principle, which some people call the most all-encompassing idea since dark,

Darwin's theory of natural selection? Well, quote, to get a sense of the potential implications of this theory, all you have to do is look at the array of people who darken the FIL's doorstep on Monday mornings. Some are here because they want to use the free energy principle to unify theories of the mind, provide a new foundation for biology, and explain life as we know it. Others hope the free energy principle will finally ground psychiatry in a functional understanding of the brain. and still others come because they want to use Fristin's ideas to break through the roadblocks in artificial intelligence research. But they all have one reason in common for being here, which is that the only person who truly understands Carl Fristin's free energy principle may be Carl Fristin himself, end quote. Speaking of artificial intelligence, the New York Times magazine this week has a good summation of how close we might be to that world imagined in the Terminator movies. Are killer robots the future of war?

And are they inevitable? The Times breaks down the state of the art. What specific systems the U.S. and other countries are currently working on developing? And, oh, yeah, get into the moral and existential implications therein. Quick, what do heart bleed, want a cry, and even iPhone bugs have in common? If you answered C and C++, you win a nerd prize. Motherboard says the Internet has a huge C and C++ problem that no one wants to talk about. That problem is that C and C++ allow for a category of errors called memory on safety.

There's also type confusion, use after free, and use of uninitialized memory, which together form some of the most common vulnerabilities exploited on the world's most popular software platforms. as the piece asks, quote, if these vulnerabilities are so prevalent, can cause so much damage, and there are languages that don't have these pitfalls, then why are these languages still so common? The piece and motherboard tries to give you an answer.

So food for thought, engineers. And food for thought entrepreneurs. I'm sure you know about product, market fit. If you're an entrepreneur, I'm sure you've read books on it, heard Paul Graham and other. rhapsodize about it. But on the first-round capital blog or website or magazine or whatever it is,

first-round review is the name, Rahul Vohara, founder of startup superhuman, does a really good deep dive into actually finding product market fit in actual real-world conditions. Quote, the descriptions of product market fit I found weren't immensely helpful for companies post-launch. If after launch revenue isn't growing, Raising money is tough, the press doesn't want to talk to you and user growth is anemic,

then you can safely conclude you don't have product market fit. But in practice, because of my previous success as a founder, we didn't have problems raising money. We could have gotten press, but we were actively avoiding it, and user growth wasn't happening because we deliberately were choosing not to onboard more users. We were pre-launch, and we didn't have any indicators to clearly illustrate our situation. The descriptions of product market fit all seems. so post hoc, so unactionable. I had a clear understanding of where we stood, but I had no way of conveying that to others and no plan for the part that should come next, end quote.

Read the piece to see the four-step way Vora and superhuman solved this problem. Next, we go back to Wired. One nightmare hacking scenario is that hackers take down the national power grid. We know this is possible. It's already happened in Ukraine. The Wired Piece is a long read looking at the strategies DARPA and the Department of Homeland Security are putting in place to, you know, if the grid goes down, boot it back up again. But the title of the piece might give you some sense of the tone. It's called the Hail Mary Plan to restart a hacked U.S. electric grid. Finally, as a kid in the 80s, man, the dream was one day to get to go to space camp. There was even that movie from 1986, Space Camp.

It really was every nerds consummation devoutly to be wished. Well, finally, Mashable has a long read-up about Space Camp because it's still there, still popular. In fact, it's been the number one tourist destination in Alabama since 2013. Why? Well, because a lot of grown-up kids from the 80s, like myself, are still signing up to play mock mission. control. Quote, you may never walk on the moon, but you can sit in the one-sixth gravity chair

attached to a series of springs on the ceiling of a warehouse and simulate the not quite light as air sensation of walking on the moon. A water pulley system allows for weightless spacewalks outside the fake ISS module. And for a little extra scratch, you can do astronaut-style scuba missions in the space camp pool, assembling a structure made of PVC tubes underwater, end quote. So maybe now's the time to firm up next year's summer vacation plans. Could include a trip to Huntsville, Alabama. That's all for the long reads brought to you once more by Betterment. Investment involves risk, but tech meme right home listeners can get up to one year of their investment money managed for free.

Just go to betterment.com slash ride. That's betterment.com slash ride. Betterment. Outsmart average. Is there anyone listening to this? show that works at Google in New York City. Because guess what? I'm coming to Google to give a talk the Monday after Thanksgiving, Monday, November 26, 2018 at 1 p.m.

We'll be talking about the book. But please, if you're listening to my voice right now and you work at Google, please come up to me after the talk and out yourself as a friend of the pod. and please be sure to bring your co-workers with you to the talk. And speaking of Friends of the Pod, my thanks and a shout out to Jason Middleton, host of the Teconomics Radio Show on KGO 810 in San Francisco. Jason interviewed me for book promo this morning, but he also revealed himself as a habitual listener of this podcast. So thank you, Jason, both for helping spread the word on the book and being a friend of the pod.

Anyway, I hope you guys have a good week. We got our first snow of the season last night. You might have heard about that. It caused a bit of an issue because it caught everyone by surprise. Snarled traffic to unbelievable degrees. I spoke to a woman this morning that was stuck on the road last night for six hours. No movement at all for six hours. People were abandoning their cars because they were running out of gas. Oh well, winter is coming as they say. Talk to you on Monday. Thank you.